Goldstone now says his outreach to Donald Trump’s son, where he said there was “very high level and sensitive information” about Hillary Clinton available as “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr Trump,” was full of “puffery”.

His intent, Goldstone says, was to arrange a meeting with the Trump family and his client Emin Agalarov, a Russian pop star whose father is oligarch Aras Agalarov. He says he didn’t think much about the language he used to approach the Trump campaign, or the content of the meeting, which he attended.

I’ll leave it to professional Trump followers — including Robert Mueller, whom Goldstone says he plans to talk to — to interpret Goldstone’s commentary. Though it seems to me the key part of the incident is the Trump campaign’s willingness to meet Russians who said they had dirt on Hillary Clinton.

As I read it, that includes Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who in Goldstone’s telling was “furious” during the meeting — because Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya didn’t provide information about Clinton. Goldstone: “I believe that she practised a classic bait-and-switch. She got in there on one pretext and really wanted to discuss something else.”

Back to Goldstone: He tells the Times he’s been hanging out in Asia, as part of a previously planned year-long trip around the world. He says he’s as surprised as anyone that he has a featured role in the ongoing Trump/Russia story: “Look, I’m quite loud, I’m quite brash and openly gay on social media,” he says. “I don’t exactly fit the mould.”

About that social media part: Until today, Goldstone seems to have clammed up on Facebook, where he used to post lots of selfies of himself in ridiculous hats. But his account is still up and running, and occasionally his friends tag him in posts: There are a series of posts from this fall featuring restaurants in Thailand. (I’m Facebook friends with Goldstone, and when I saw them I assumed the tags were jokes, because why would Goldstone want people to know where he was if he wasn’t talking in public? But now it looks like they were real, after all.)

Now Goldstone is using the account again — to promote himself. Today’s post is a video of someone flipping through a print edition of Goldstone’s profile, with this caption: “Today — after many months — I got my voice back and told my story exclusively to the UK Sunday Times Magazine.”

Presumably Goldstone will have more Facebook posts to come, when he publishes a book he says he’s writing. Working title: “Useful Idiot: How an Email Trumped My Life.”

Saturday Night Live took us behind the scenes in its cold open tonight of a totally plausible meeting between Julian Assange and the Brothers Trump in the first installment of what we can only hope will be many, many more episodes of “The Mueller Files.”

Anyway, the meeting, which ostensibly took place between Assange and Donald Trump Jr. (Mikey Day) in the basement of the Ecuadorian embassy in London – where the real Assange has been holed up since 2012 avoiding extradition to Sweden to face sexual assault charges – was crashed by a delightfully inept Eric Trump (Alex Moffat), who did just about everything he could to blow the clandestine convention. Read more…

Saturday Night Live took us behind the scenes in its cold open tonight of a totally plausible meeting between Julian Assange and the Brothers Trump in the first installment of what we can only hope will be many, many more episodes of “The Mueller Files.”

Anyway, the meeting, which ostensibly took place between Assange and Donald Trump Jr. (Mikey Day) in the basement of the Ecuadorian embassy in London – where the real Assange has been holed up since 2012 avoiding extradition to Sweden to face sexual assault charges – was crashed by a delightfully inept Eric Trump (Alex Moffat), who did just about everything he could to blow the clandestine convention. Read more…

This Slaughterbots fictional video from the Future of Life Institute depicts a swarm killer robot drone attack. This chilling short was presented at the recent UN conference on fully autonomous weapon systems.